Saturday, December 10, 2016

A federal judge on Friday
unveiled a long sealed proposed class-action complaint that accused the law
firm, Johnson & Bell, of failing to take adequate steps to protect the data
on its servers.

The caseis currently proceeding in confidential
arbitration and the complaint was filed in April by the plaintiff’s firm
Edelson P.C. on behalf of two of Johnson & Bell’s onetime clients, Jason
Shore, a California resident, and Coinabul, a Wyoming limited liability
company.

I don’t think they mean hacking as we know it.They seem to think that millions of Russians
were shipped into the US Midwest and voted for Trump. Or perhaps they just think it wasn’t fair that
Democrats were hacked and Republicans were not?

President Obama asked intelligence officials to perform a
“full review” of election-related hacking this week, and plans will share a
report of its findings with lawmakers before he leaves office on January 20,
2017.

Deputy White House Press Secretary Eric Schultz said
Friday that the investigation will reach all the way
back to 2008, [See?It’s not just
Trump.Bob] and will examine
patterns of “malicious cyber-activity timed to election cycles.” He emphasized that the White House is not
questioning the results of the November election.

CIA 'believes Russia intervened to help Donald Trump win
Presidential Election - and now has the proof'

…Last night, the
Washington Post reported CIA sources as saying the agency now believes it has
evidence individuals with connections to the Russian government were behind a
number of hacks targeting the Democrats.

…CIA agents
allegedly say it is now "quite clear"
that electing Trump was Russia's goal..

American intelligence agencies have concluded with “high
confidence” that Russia
acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm
Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump, according to senior
administration officials.

They based that
conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with
high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s
computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but
did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks.

Well, we were definitely wrong, because Verizon Wireless has
just issued a statement saying that it will not send the death ROM update to
Galaxy Note 7 devices. Interestingly
enough, the company says that it is taking this precaution in order to ensure
the safety of its customers in the case of an emergency. The statement reads:

Verizon will not be taking
part in this update because of the added risk this could pose to Galaxy Note 7
users that do not have another device to switch to. We will not push a
software upgrade that will eliminate the ability for the Note 7 to work as a
mobile device in the heart of the holiday travel season. We do not want to make
it impossible to contact family, first responders or medical professionals in
an emergency situation.

For starters, this wording is a bit curious, as no one is
going to be
boarding a flight domestically or from the U.S. to a foreign destination
with a Galaxy Note 7 in tow — they’ve been banned from all airlines. And the part about not being able to contact
emergency responders is a bit comical considering that you wouldn’t be able to
call anyway if your Galaxy Note 7 is on fire.

The Wolverine State just became one of the first in the
country to formally give the thumbs-up to autonomous cars on public roads, with
no driver in the front seat.

Friday, Governor Rick Snyder put his signature on bills
permitting automakers to operate networks of self-driving taxis in the
state.1

…“As near as I
can tell from the language and the context, what’s going on is a specific
effort to implement a specific regime for a specific company,” says Bryant
Walker Smith, a legal scholar with the University of South Carolina School of
Law who studies self-driving vehicles.

I have a couple of friends (I do, honest!) who speak
better French than I do.Perhaps this
will allow me to catch up?

While the world waits on Apple, Molotov brings the future of
TV to France and raises $23 million

…Molotov is a
free app that allows users to watch any of the 70 basic free channels in
France. It works in partnership with
French TV stations, so it’s all perfectly legal. And no cable subscription is required to
access the stations. It is a big step
toward making those over-the-top (OTT) dreams a reality.

…Molotov’s app
has been available on almost all iOS, tvOS, Windows, and Android platforms. It
allows for a continuous viewing experience across all those platforms. But it
also solves the problem of needing a dozen apps for each channel to catch what
limited live streams may be available.

…Via
Inside Higher Ed: “The number of complaints filed last year with the U.S.
Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights soared to a
record 16,720, according to a report the department released Thursday. The number of complaints was a 61
percent increase over the previous year’s total.”

…Via
Inside Higher Ed: “After months of review, the U.S. Department of Education
on Wednesday approved the proposed $1.14 billion sale of Apollo
Education Group, which owns the University of Phoenix,
to a group of three private equity firms.” The sale comes with conditions, including: 1)
the Department of Education demands a letter of credit valued at 25% of the
company’s federal funding allocation; 2) the company cannot add or change its
educational offerings or open new locations until 2018; and 3) enrollment must
be maintained at or beneath current levels. More via
The Chronicle of Higher Education and via
Bloomberg.

…Via
The Guardian: “ To Kill a Mockingbird removed from Virginia
schools for racist language.”

…Common
Sense Media surveyed parents
on their own digital media habits. “On
any given day, parents of American tweens and teens average more than nine
hours with screen media each day.”

Friday, December 09, 2016

A most interesting hack.Do you suppose that every phone manufacturer has the ability to turn
your phone into a worthless lump of plastic and glass?If so, would it surprise you to know that my
Ethical Hacking students are looking for that secret code?

The Galaxy
Note 7 is a smartphone Samsung wants everyone to forget about as soon as
possible, but for now, the company is still trying to stop Note 7 handsets from
being used due to the danger they pose. This
is a handset that can explode, after all.

Following a ban by airlines, a recall program, and even a battery charge-limiting update,
Samsung looks set to take yet another, much more final step to stop Note 7 use.

An image shared with The Verge shows an alert sent out to a
Note 7 owner in the US stating that their phone will be prevented from charging
as of December 15. In other words, the
Note 7 is being permanently disabled.

Rostelecom said in a statement that it "successfully
thwarted DDoS (distributed denial of service) on the five biggest banks and
financial organisations in Russia" on December 5.

"The most sustained attack lasted more than two
hours," it said.

Russia's FSB security service last week said it had uncovered plans
by foreign intelligence services to carry out massive cyber attacks targeting
the country's financial system from December 5.

…The FSB did not say which countries' secret
services were involved in the latest plot against Russian banks but alleged the
attacks would use servers and "command centres" located in the
Netherlands belonging to Ukrainian hosting company, BlazingFast.

…The game is free
to download but features a one-time $9.99 purchase to unlock all levels. iOS
software piracy is possible on jailbroken devices with app stores
dedicated to downloading cracked apps and games.

From Mashable, Miyamoto says there is no ability to play
offline to protect against software piracy

…According to the
transcribed interview, Nintendo is worried about piracy risks as the game
is launching in 150 countries on devices it does not control. He says that the network connection is
used to update game saves and sync progress across devices via a Nintendo cloud
account.

There is a “flood of data that’s coming,” he told the
automotive industry professionals. And
it’s going to be significantly more than the amount of data that the average
person generates today.

The averagely driven car will churn out 4,000 GB of data per day, he says. And that's just for one hour of driving a day.
One can compare that to an average person’s
video, chat and other internet use, which Krzanich says is about 650 MB per day
and will escalate to 1.5 GB per day, or essentially double, by 2020.

Starbucks’ newest pink drink is being rolled out at some
7,800 stores across the United States—stores that are also being turned into
PokéStops and Pokémon Gyms.

In these virtual arenas players can pit monsters they’ve
caught in battles against those captured by others—victorious trainers can even
take over a gym and then defend it from virtual attack. All while supping on a Pokémon GO Frappuccino
(a Vanilla Bean Frappuccino with raspberry syrup and freeze-dried
blackberries.)

Thieves using a $17 power amplifier to break into cars with
remote keyless systems

Cars with keyless entry systems are capable of searching
for a wireless key fob that is within a couple feet of the vehicle, but car
thieves can use a $17 "power amplifier" to boost the key searching
capabilities, sometimes up to around 100 meters, and pull off a high-tech car
break-in.

…Mr. Danev
said that when the teenage girl turned on her device, it amplified the distance
that the car can search, which then allowed my car to talk to my key, which
happened to be sitting about 50 feet away, on the kitchen counter. And just like that, open sesame.

"It's a bit like a loudspeaker, so when you
say hello over it, people who are 100 meters away can hear the word, ‘hello,'
" Mr. Danev said. "You can buy
these devices anywhere for under $100." He said some of the lower-range devices cost
as little as $17 and can be bought online on sites like eBay, Amazon and
Craigslist.

…those who
closely follow their efforts say the combined entity will focus on three areas:
increasing knowledge worker productivity, improving human resource and people
management, and boosting marketing and sales performance.

…Microsoft’s
Office Graph is a backend, machine-learning system that runs as part of
Microsoft’s Office 365 suite of productivity tools, including Word, Outlook and
Excel. The Office Graph provides data
about who a user is and what he or she is doing with Office and various other
Microsoft applications, such as Yammer, its enterprise collaboration program.

Unlike LinkedIn’s social graph, the 1 billion users of
Office don’t access Office Graph directly and may not even be aware that it’s there; its function is to
operate behind the scenes to connect people, content and events

…But as Microsoft
looks to make these connections more ubiquitous and more central to how
professionals work, it requires more data than its own customer base can
provide, and gathering external data—from sources such as LinkedIn—becomes
increasingly important.

It wasn't until a full 10 seconds later that Boeing stock began trading down on the news in
the premarket hours, a dive that would shortly send Boeing's stock price down
by as much as 1 percent in early trading, before rallying back later in the
day.

The 10-second delay, which was calculated by the analysis
firm Nanex, indicates that something rare was likely happening in global
markets Tuesday morning: Human beings were seeing — and reacting to — news
before computer trading programs could move on it.

In an era of super-fast algorithmic trading in which
delays are measured in milliseconds and less, the 10-second gap indicates that
possibly no one in global markets has yet figured out a way to incorporate
Trump's tweets into their trading algorithms. If they had, the market response would likely
have come much, much faster.

…we believe that
the technology underlying digital currencies such as bitcoin — technology
commonly known as blockchain — will have profound effects on the nature of
companies: how they are funded and managed, how they create value, and how they
perform basic functions such as marketing, accounting, and incentivizing
people. In some cases, software will
eliminate the need for many management functions.

A programming challenge?Other than a few questions, this should be simple.

Is “fake news” a reference to government propaganda
designed to look like independent journalism? Or is it any old made-up bullshit
that people share as real on the internet? Is “fake news” the appropriate label for a
hoax meant to make a larger point? Does
a falsehood only become “fake news” when it shows up on a
platform like Facebook as legitimate news? What about conspiracy theorists
who genuinely believe the outrageous lies they’re sharing? Or satire intended to entertain? And is it still “fake news” if we’re talking
about a real news organization that unintentionally gets it wrong? (Also, what constitutes a real news
organization anymore?)

As its ‘bad
guy’ stereotype wanes, hacker job postings in the enterprise jump 700% in three
years.

…Some 59 percent
of executives surveyed by Radware and Merrill Research have either hired or
would hire an ex-hacker as a way to inject cybersecurity talent into their
workforce. More than a quarter of
organizations have been using ex-hackers for more than two years, according to
the survey, including so-called white hats or ethical hackers, gray hats –
those who skirt the law or ethical standards but not for malicious purposes --
and black hats who operate with malicious intent.

…“Hackers are
exceptionally skilled in finding the little tiny things that other people
forget – those vulnerabilities you don’t know yet, things you thought you fixed
but not entirely properly,” says Alex Rice, CTO and co-founder of HackerOne, a
bug bounty platform with 70,000 hackers in its community. “Every organization out there has something
they’ve missed.”Organizations are
willing to assume the risks in exchange for access to the unique mindset and
skillset of a hacker.

Wednesday, December 07, 2016

A database within the University
of Wisconsin-Madison Law School that contained Social Security numbers and name
pairs corresponding with 1,213 Law School
applicants for 2005-’06 was hacked last month, the university
announced Tuesday.

The university became aware Nov.
3 that the database had been breached, and sent notices to those affected Dec.
6, offering them free credit monitoring for a year to help protect them against
identity theft. No other personal
identification information was contained in the files, according to a news
release.

Starting today, 40 organizations will rely upon the clever
computers cognitive power to help spot cybercrime. The Watson for Cybersecurity beta program
helps IBM too, because Watson’s real-world experience will help it hone its
skills and work within specific industries.

…Watson isn’t
starting from scratch here.IBM
researchers started training Watson in the fundamentals of cybersecurity
last spring so the computer could begin to analysize and prevent threats. Now it graduates to real-world situations to
further hone its skills. Think of it as
the world’s smartest intern.

No doubt this would make an amusing student debate, if I could
get them to stop laughing.

Since winning the presidential election, Donald Trump has reportedly
skipped out on the majority of his intelligence briefings; this
past Sunday, Trump made headlines after sharing
false information blaming his loss of the popular vote on mass voter fraud
— a claim previously reported by the conspiracy news site Infowars. It’s been widely reported that Trump is an
obsessive consumer of cable news — he has himself admitted to receiving at
least a portion of his military
advice from “the shows.”

Supreme Court Upholds Insider-Trading Convictions For Family
And Friends

The U.S. Supreme Court handed white-collar prosecutors a
victory by upholding the conviction of a man who traded on insider information
that came from his brother-in-law. But
the court rejected the government's more expansive view of insider-trading law,
sticking to a decades-old precedent requiring prosecutors to prove the tipper
received some benefit -- even the intangible benefit of rewarding family and
friends -- in exchange for inside information.

YouTube has paid over $1 billion to the music industry from
advertising alone in the last year

Bolstered by music subscription revenue, the music
industry is growing again for the first time in over a decade. Last month, analysts
at Macquarie even predicted that global recorded music revenues will double
over the next 10 years.

In a world where the average employee sends and receives
122 emails per day and attends an average of 62 meetings per month, your boss
or HR leadership simply doesn’t have the time or bandwidth to properly think
through how best to deploy your talents moving forward. Instead, we have to take control of our career
planning to ensure we’re putting ourselves in position for long-term growth.
Here are four ways to become more strategic about the process.

Tuesday, December 06, 2016

It was only last week that Experian released a white paper
on what it sees as data
breach risks for 2017. Perhaps
ironically, then, it was only days later when a dark web vendor claimed to have
Experian’s database for sale. HackRead
reported on “DoubleFlag’s” listing:

The hacker claims he has access
to the Experian database which contains information of some 203,419,083
accounts and has set the price for this database at Bitcoin 0.8082 (USD
600.00).

…Waqas was clear
to report this only as a claim and he stated that the database had not
been confirmed as an Experian database.DataBreaches.net
reached out to Experian for either a confirmation or refutation of Doubleflag’s
claim. Today, a spokesperson for
Experian sent the following statement:

“We’ve seen this unfounded
allegation and similar rumors before. We
investigated it again – and see no signs that we’ve been compromised based on
our research and the type of data involved. Based on our investigations and the lack of credible
evidence, we consider this an unsubstantiated claim intended to inflate the
value of the data that they are trying to sell – a common practice by hackers
selling illegal data.”

Data breach notification service LeakedSource has obtained
a database containing the details of roughly 85 million Dailymotion users,
including usernames, email addresses and, in many cases, passwords.

According to LeakedSource, the database stores 87 million
records with 85 million unique email addresses. More than 18 million of the
entries also include password hashes. LeakedSource said the hackers claimed to have stolen the data on around October 20.

SecurityWeek has analyzed a sample of nearly 10,000 entries
and determined, based on LeakedSource and Have I Been Pwned searches, that many of
the accounts had not been compromised in previous breaches.

The government is pushing very
strongly for a cashless society. After
the demonetisation move, several initiatives have been seen to further
encourage going cashless. The latest of
these is the Ministry of Urban Development’s direction for all Urban Local
Bodies to shift to e-payments. While
cashless transactions are a convenience and the future, it is being pushed
without addressing two critical concerns – security and privacy of digital
transactions. In the case of e-wallets
and other fintech corporations, laws establishing security requirements and
liabilities for loss are missing.

…What is to be
done? From our work with successful
sports leaders, we accept that there is a significant gap between the quants
and the decision makers, a gap that we call the “interpretation gap.” We believe that those who are needed to fill
that gap are what we call “data translators.” While some have argued that data scientists
can bridge the gap, we think that, in many cases, the data translator role can
best be filled by domain experts. To
date, many businesses have been trying to bridge the gap by teaching the quants
(often recent graduates) about the business in which they operate.

Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter and YouTube
are coming together to help curb the spread of terrorist content online

…Starting today,
we commit to the creation of a shared industry database of “hashes” — unique
digital “fingerprints” — for violent terrorist imagery or terrorist recruitment
videos or images that we have removed from our services. By sharing this information with each other,
we may use the shared hashes to help identify potential terrorist content on
our respective hosted consumer platforms. We hope this collaboration will lead to
greater efficiency as we continue to enforce our policies to help curb the
pressing global issue of terrorist content online.

Tech does grocery? Which part of “we will sell everything” didn’t you get?

…Today, Amazon
made a modest announcement that looks straight out of the Bezos playbook:
Amazon Go, “a new kind of store with no checkout required.” The company calls it “Just Walk Out” shopping.
But it’s really an attempt to eradicate one of the more frustrating aspects of shopping
in stores: the
checkout line. It’s pure Bezos:
start with 1,800 ft. of grocery retail space in downtown Seattle and see if you
can remake retail all over again.

The basic idea behind Go isn’t completely original. Years ago, companies like IBM foresaw a checkout-line-free
future, using RFID chips embedded in packages. But Amazon is using the kind of modern
deep-learning technology it’s rolling out to its cloud clients, along with
computer vision and sensor fusion. For
shoppers, the tech will be invisible. They
just fire up a Go app, grab what they want, and be on their way.

I have many students from India.Their perspective is a bit different, but
interesting to listen to.

Amazon is on overdrive in India. Earlier this year, the world’s largest online
retailer became the second-largest online marketplace in the country by
shipments and gross merchandise value. (Flipkart remains number one in India.) It also announced an additional $3 billion
investment, taking its total investment in India to $5 billion

…According to
media reports, Walmart is all set to join the Indian e-tail party soon. While the company is reported to be talking to
several Indian e-tailers like Snapdeal and Shopclues, the strongest buzz is
around Walmart entering into a strategic alliance with Flipkart or making
an investment in the company, possibly to
the tune of $1 billion.

After getting caught cheating, VW wants you looking in
another direction.

Volkswagen Takes Challenge to Uber, Lyft With New Berlin-Based
Company

Volkswagen
AG on Monday launched a new company to challenge Uber Technologies Inc.
and other tech rivals, seeking to become a global force in the digital
auto services that are threatening established car makers.

…One of Moia’s
businesses already is operating: the Gett ride-hailing service, in which
Volkswagen acquired
a strategic stake in May for $300 million. Moia plans next year to launch another
service, an app-based shuttle, or ride-pooling service using electric vans to
transport commuters.

…Volkswagen
eventually wants to equip Gett with a fleet of robot taxis, anticipating that
car ownership could decline with the emergence of new car-sharing services,
creating fresh competition from shared vehicles and self-driving taxi and
delivery services.

With Google's New App, Your Loved Ones Can Find You During
Emergencies

…From Apple’s
Find My Friends to Facebook’s Safety Check, tech
giants are creating ways to help people during emergencies. And Google has taken things one step further
with Trusted
Contacts.

Trusted Contacts allows users to share their location with
any of their designated “trusted contacts,” while trusted contacts can request
the user's location as well. A person
can accept or decline someone’s request, but if they don’t respond, the app
will automatically accept the request and share that individual's location.

…The app is only
available for Android right now, but will be available on iPhones soon.

A new system from MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
(CSAIL) is the first to allow users to design,
simulate, and build their own custom drone. Users can change the size, shape, and
structure of their drone based on the specific needs they have for
payload, cost, flight time, battery usage, and other factors.

…Just before 5
AM, the BMW’s owner discovered her car was missing and called 911. Officers contacted BMW corporate, which was
able to track the vehicle to the 2100 block of NE 63rd Street. When officers pulled up on the block around
5:45 AM, they found the BMW parked in an alley, still running, with a man
asleep in the driver’s seat.

BMW employees were able to remotely lock the car’s doors,
trapping the suspect inside

Samsung is going to have to live with their failure for a
long, long time.

Samsung Knew Note 7 Had A Dangerous Design, But Took The Risk
Anyway, Say Analysts

…according to a respected independent team of hardware engineers who
cracked open a Note 7 for a test recently, they've concluded that the phone's
tendency to combust is due to a "fundamental problem with the design
of the phone," and that Samsung sort of knew the "super
aggressive" design was risky, but went with it anyway because it was
trying so hard to innovate and gain a competitive edge.

The Boston Police Department is taking heat from civil
liberty groups for plans to spend up to $1.4 million on new software that
scours social media and the internet for potential threats.

The attack Monday on the Ohio State University
campus is just the latest illustration of why local law enforcement authorities
need every tool they can muster to stop terrorism and other violence before it
starts, according to Boston Police Commissioner William Evans.

Monitoring technology can quickly mine the internet, from
chat rooms to social media to blog posts, for certain keywords and phrases. It can track postings in a certain geographic
area, send alerts to police about potentially dangerous postings and more. Law-enforcement officials say the technology
allows them to more quickly and efficiently spot possible red flags in near
real-time.

…A Facebook post by the suspect Abdul Razak
Ali Artan before the attack suggested
he was angry over what he perceived as mistreatment of Muslims, but
didn’t express loyalty to a specific group or ideology, according to people
familiar with the case.

It will soon be illegal to punish customers who criticize
businesses online

Congress has passed a law protecting the right of US
consumers to post negative online reviews without fear of retaliation from
companies.

The bipartisan Consumer Review Fairness Act
was passed by unanimous consent in the US Senate yesterday, a Senate Commerce
Committee announcement said.
The bill, introduced
in 2014, was already approved by the House of Representatives and now
awaits President Obama's signature.

Jakob
Nielsen on November 13, 2016. “Summary: Across 33 rich countries, only 5%
of the population has high computer-related abilities, and only a third of
people can complete medium-complexity tasks. One of
usability’s most hard-earned lessons is that you are not the user. This is why it’s a disaster to guess at the users’ needs.
Since designers are so different from
the majority of the target audience, it’s not just irrelevant what you like or
what you think is easy to use — it’s often misleading to rely on such personal
preferences. For sure, anybody who works
on a design project will have a more accurate and detailed mental model of the user interface than an
outsider. If you target a broad consumer
audience, you will also have a higher IQ than your average user, higher literacy levels, and, most
likely, you’ll be younger and experience less age-driven degradation of your abilities than many
of your users. There is one more
difference between you and the average user that’s even more damaging to your
ability to predict what will be a good user interface: skills in using
computers, the Internet, and technology in general. Anybody who’s on a web-design team or other
user experience project is a veritable supergeek compared with the average
population. This not just true for the
developers. Even the less-technical team
members are only “less-technical” in comparison with the engineers. They still have much stronger technical skills
than most normal people…”

Uber envisions a future in which a fleet of vehicles can
make the most complex maneuvers while carting passengers around without
the help of a driver. To achieve
that, cars will need to get a whole lot smarter.

Enter Gary Marcus
and Zoubin Ghahraman. The two men are
being appointed as co-directors of Uber’s new in-house research arm on
artificial intelligence, which the ride-hailing company unveiled on Monday. The research arm’s aim is to apply A.I. in
areas like self-driving vehicles, along with solving other technological
challenges through machine learning.

Another car company struggling to catch up to Uber. They even have a good reason to do it.

The Fortune 500 company, one of the top
10 largest banks in the U.S. with $313 billion in total assets, wants to be
a tech company that also is a top financial services provider.

…"We need to
be a high-productivity software engineering organization," Alexander said
in an interview with Computerworld at this week's AWS re:Invent
conference. "The winners in banking are going to be really great technology
companies. It didn't use to
be the case historically that you really needed to be a great software
development company and a great analytics company, but it's really important
today."

The Japanese electronics company plans to buy
car-component maker ZKW Group for ¥100 billion ($881 million), according to The
Wall Street Journal. The Austrian
company is a leading supplier of automotive lights for car makers such as Audi and BMW.

Headlamps may not sound like the sexiest part in a car,
but innovations are popping up even there. A matrix of LED lights controlled by a front
camera, for example, can allow cars to maintain high-beam headlights without
blinding other road users by turning parts of the light off when there is
oncoming traffic.A headlight could also
send targeted light at potential hazards detected by a night-vision system, say
a pedestrian crossing the road in the dark.

It is precisely such redesigning of boring old auto parts
that has kicked up a flurry of deals in the space, long before futuristic
self-driving vehicles arrive.

Brennan Center for Justice – New Report: “Secret Law”
Governs Key Aspects of National Security Policy – “At least 74 opinions, memoranda, and letters issued by the
Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) between 2002 and 2009 on
core post-9/11 national security topics, including intelligence activities and
the detention and interrogation of terrorist suspects, remain entirely classified, according to a new report by the Brennan
Center for Justice at NYU School of Law. OLC’s advice is legally binding on the
executive branch in the same way a court order would be. OLC opinions are just one component of an
unprecedented buildup of secret law created by the federal government since
9/11 through a range of unpublished legal rules and opinions – all issued
without public scrutiny or input – that govern policies affecting the lives and
liberties of U.S. citizens. Relying
partly on new data obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, the
Brennan Center’s report, The New
Era of Secret Law, concludes
that secret law is prevalent throughout all three branches of government.Along with OLC opinions, the report
examines classified rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court
(known as the “FISA Court”), secret presidential directives, unpublished
regulations, redacted opinions in regular federal courts, agreements with
foreign nations, closed immigration proceedings, and even classified provisions
of legislation…”

One of the melted reactors at the tsunami-hit Fukushima
nuclear power plant had a temporary loss of cooling Monday when a worker accidentally bumped a switch while
passing through a narrow isle of switch panels during an inspection and turned
off the pumping system.

The plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., said
cooling for the No. 3 reactor, one of the three that melted following the 2011
earthquake and tsunami, was out for
nearly an hour before a backup pump kicked in.

…Here’s one way
to look at it: Every single day,
Amazon’s cloud-computing business adds enough server capacity to support the
data-storage and computing needs that the online tech giant had in 2005, when
it had revenue of $8.5 billion. That’s
about the revenue of a middling Fortune 500 company.

…Another way of
measuring it: As of December, AWS either rented or owned about 6.7 million
square feet of space, or the equivalent of some 116 football fields.

Artificial intelligence for my students, even if they don’t
have the natural kind…

Artificial intelligence developed by the likes of Google's
DeepMind and Elon Musk's OpenAI is taught within the confines of game worlds –
including navigating around mazes, dodging deadly cliffs, playing laser tag and
flying through space.

In a mission to build a general AI
capable of solving any problem put in front of it, DeepMind is open-sourcing its game code to everyone.The software and 14 levels from DeepMind Labs
will be put on GitHub later this
week.

And, not to be outdone, Elon Musk's own OpenAI is also
releasing its own 'computer training ground' called Universe. Universe is
open-source software that supports Gym; OpenAI's toolkit for testing
its algorithms which help software play games, for example, using a reward
scheme.

When you look back a decade,
it’s easy to feel that little has changed. Sure, you had a different job back then, there
were other shows on TV, and no one had described your shoes as “on fleek” just
yet, but what’s different, really? Yet
when asked to think about the year 2006, most people today would probably
Google it on a smartphone.

See, right then and there, you have your answer:
Smartphones changed everything.

Yes, I run you over, but I still enjoy playing with
you?Miller is a nicer guy than his
victims think!

Von Miller gives every player in AFC West custom bottle of
wine, thank you note

…On the label of
each bottle is an orange outline of eye-glasses, Miller’s signature accessory,
and his autograph. And shipped with each was a note that read:

It is an honor and a
privilege to take the field and compete with you twice a year. We are so fortunate to have this opportunity
to fulfill our childhood dreams of playing in the NFL. The blood, sweat, aches and pains, and endless
hours spent watching film are a testament to the love and dedication we have
for this game. So take a moment, reflect
on all your successes, and enjoy your accomplishment. Appreciate those who have helped you get this
far, and start working towards your next childhood dream.

Links

About Me

I live in Centennial Colorado. (I'm not actually 100 years old., but I hope to be some day.) I'm an independant computer consultant, specializing in solving problems that traditional IT personnel tend to have difficulty with... That includes everything from inventorying hardware & software, to converting systems & data, to training end-users. I particularly enjoy taking on projects that IT has attempted several times before with no success. I also teach at two local Universities: everything from Introduction to Microcomputers through Business Continuity and Security Management. My background includes IT Audit, Computer Security, and a variety of unique IT projects.